Kurt Vonnegut gained notoriety and acclaim for his novels -- like Breakfast of Champions, “a slippery, lucid, bleakly humorous jaunt through (sick? inhumane?) America circa 1973,” with Vonnegut acting as our Virgil-like companion, Cat's Cradle, a satirical commentary on modern man and his madness,” and Slaughterhouse-Five, “one of the world's great anti-war books. Centering on the infamous fire-bombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we are afraid to know.”

But it was his rejected master thesis in anthropology that he called his “prettiest contribution to his culture.”

“The shapes of a society's stories,” he said, “is at least as interesting as the shapes of its pots and spearheads.”

Kurt Vonnegut grained worldwide fame and adoration through the publication of his novels, including Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat's Cradle, Breakfast of Champions, and more. But is was his rejected master's thesis in anthropology that he called his prettiest contribution to his culture. - See more at: http://visual.ly/kurt-vonnegut-shapes-stories-0?utm_source=visually_embed#sthash.Gto3bkTG.dpuf

How do we behave when we find ourselves in a situation we didn't seek?

Marcus Aurelius was born in an aristocratic family and learned religious piety and simplicity in diet from his mother, philosophy and literary style from two tutors who became very influential in his thinking.

But he was destined to hold a position in society for which he was not well suited given his sensitive and studious nature -- he was to become the ruler of an ancient and corrupt civilization that dominated most of the known world#.

The Meditations were likely his way of coping with the cards his destiny had dealt him:

“When force of circumstance upsets your equanimity, lose no time in recovering your self-control, and do not remain out of tune longer than you can help. Habitual recurrence to the harmony will increase your mastery of it.”

Turning desired behaviors into habits helps us respond to situations rather than reacting. We can control our character, even as we cannot control the circumstances. Further, what happens outside our control calls for a commitment to work things out:

“Adapt yourself to the environment in which your lot has been cast, and show true love to the fellow-mortals with whom destiny has surrounded you.”

As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson say in Metaphors we Live By, “our account of truth is based on understanding.” Our experiences and resulting understanding can be direct and indirect. For example:

There are dimensions of experience in terms of which we function most of the time in our direct interactions with other and with out immediate physical and cultural environment. We categorize the entities we directly encounter and the direct experiences we have in terms of these categories.

[...]

But [...] many aspects of our experience cannot be clearly delineated in terms of the naturally emergent dimensions of our experience. This is typically the case for human emotions, abstract concepts, mental activity, time, work, human institutions, social practices, etc. and even for physical objects that have no inherent boundaries or orientations.

Though most of these can be experienced directly, none of them can be fully comprehended on their own terms. Instead, we must understand them in terms of other entities and experiences, typically other kinds of entities and experiences.

This is where we look to parts, stages, purposes, and so on. Marcus Aurelius uses the power of metaphor in his description of living:

“The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing, in as much as it, too, demands a firm and watchful stance against any unexpected onset.”

It's thus useful to:

“If possible, make it a habit to discover the essential character of every impression, its effects on the self, and its response to a logical analysis.”

Marcus Aurelius makes for a worthy conversation companion on the trials and occurrences of everyday life. His Meditations is contains wisdom distilled through experience.

Language is one of the most sophisticated cognitive skills we possess as humans. It expresses and shapes thought. It contains an implicit classification of experience and is designed to change the neural pathways to the brain, thus changing minds.

The changing patterns occur through the use of sounds and symbols. It's a process like that of using metaphors. A metaphor finds connections between things in the mind and new connections enable the mind to see the world differently.

In Metaphors we Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson say metaphors are pervasive in our everyday lives and they influence not just language, but also our thoughts and actions. But:

Since communication is based on the same conceptual system that we use in thinking and acting, language is an important source of evidence for what that system is like.

Primarily on the basis of linguistic evidence, we have found that most of our ordinary conceptual system is metaphorical in nature. And we have found a way to begin to identify in detail what the metaphors are that structure how we perceive, how we think, and what we do.

Take for example the concept of argument and the corresponding conceptual metaphor that argument is war. “This metaphor is reflected in our everyday language in a variety of expressions:”

Your claims are indefensible

He attackedevery weak point in my argument

His criticisms were right on target

I demolished his argument

I've never won an argument with him

You disagree? Okay, shoot!

If you use that strategy, he'll wipe you out

He shot down all my arguments

[...]

Try to imagine a culture where arguments are not viewed in terms of war, where no one wins or loses, where there is no sense of attacking or defending, gaining or losing ground.

Imagine where an argument is viewed as a dance, the participants are seen as performers, and the goal is to perform in a balanced and aesthetically pleasing way. In such a culture, people would view arguments differently, experience them differently, carry them out differently, and talk about them differently.

We would not think of it as “arguing” in the sense we typically do at all. Thus we would have the ability -- and the freedom -- to structure out thinking around discourse differently. This would bring about different outcomes. When we're busy arguing, we don't see all the other options we could have as part of the exchange -- because we're down the warpath, of bringing that metaphor to life.

Now let's think about another very common metaphor -- that of time. In this linguistic analysis we can see how “time is money” permeates our realities:

You're wasting my time

This gadget will save you hours

I don't have the time to give you

How do you spend your time these days?

That flat tire cost me an hour

I've invested a lot of time in her

I don't have enough time to spare for that

You're running out of time

You need to budget your time

Put aside some time for ping pong

Is that worth your while?

Do you have much time left?

He's living on borrowed time

You don't use your time profitably

I lost a lot of time when I got sick

Thank you for your time

[...]

Corresponding to the fact that we act as if time is a valuable commodity -- a limited resource, even money -- we conceive of time that way.

It is a relatively new metaphorical concept of our culture. “There are cultures where time is none of these things,” say the authors of Metaphors we Live By. Globalization and access are spreading ideas, images, and goods faster and more, but our identity is still tied to many elements that are cultural -- made of heritage, environment, needs, interactions in the world where we grow up and live.

When we think of all this, communication may seem like a miracle. We should marvel that it happens at all. Two or more beings engaged in changing each other's brains. Sometimes, we enter conversations open to changing our minds as well.

Many neurolinguistic studies have been conducted on how the mind creates language. Yet few follow the opposite direction -- figuring out how language changes minds. By language I intend the deliberate and considerate use of terminology and phraseology to communicate intent, share vision, engage in thought, reach out to someone to connect and inspire.

In my welcome note more than nine years ago I talked briefly about how engaging in a dialogue is a way of thinking together and creating something new.

Writers often say that they do not know what they think until they put pen to paper. Putting pen to paper is a very different sensory experience than typing on a machine. Letter writing combines our desire to express what we think and feel with the art of calligraphy and more of our senses -- touch, manual ability, and language -- in a system that also provides stimulation back to us in a form of sensory feedback.

Letter writing is a lost art. Writing a letter is giving a gift of more. It implies a reciprocity that creates a two-way relationship with our experience and that of the person for whom we write. Addressee and writer connect in the tangible act through the power of the handwritten word and the container in which it comes -- the letter, or card.

But we live in a culture of time is money, where we make efficient use of resources by automating messages, sending quick emails, text messages, chat notes, quick hashtags and tweets, one day perhaps grunts. For this reason, with no time for conversation we indulge in narcissistic monologues instead of dances, or exchanges, barely seeing the person behind the avatar.

In this “time is money” context there is little space for letter writing. We've done away with writing letters in the name of efficiency.

Email is helping us stay in rapid-fire contact with one another. Memos and emails give companies the ability to communicate with hundreds of employees simultaneously.

But there is something to be said for a hand-written note -- it's personal, it's intimate, it communicates much more than just a desire to stay in touch. It touches us back. And maybe, just maybe dedicating the time to write a letter helps us change the conceptual metaphor of time itself.

We underestimate the value of experiences. A well thought out conversation delivers on many levels, including the emotional sphere. That hard-to-reach spot between fuzzy feeling and moved to tears is the core of how we operate in the real world.

It is thus not surprising that seasoned pros would seek situations where they get to experience feeling their way through what they think about -- this is how good conversation works.

Terry Gross, host of Fresh Air, has mastered the art of opening up. Her guests relish the opportunity to experience what it's like to have that kind of interview:

Matthew Weiner, the creator of ‘‘Mad Men,’’ has been among the most frequent guests on ‘‘Fresh Air.’’ He imagined being interviewed by Gross years before it first happened, and once it did, ‘‘you’re like: Oh, this is my fantasy of a conversation,’’ Weiner told me. ‘‘I’m not even talking about people hearing it. I’m talking about actually having the conversation.’’

‘‘Having the conversation’’ — that’s what’s compelling about the wish. It’s a wish not for recognition but for an experience. It’s a wish for Gross to locate your genius, even if that genius has not yet been expressed. It’s a wish to be seen as in a wish to be understood.

In a world that has alas celebrated the extinction of the verb ‘‘to listen’’ what is left is visual enslavement. In such a world, radio is a last oasis, a natural environment where among bushes and stones one can still find everything -- literature and gossip, from Cole Porter to Puccini, from politics to some extinct musical form. On the radio, it is still possible to find words offered to the listener with that tact that TV abhors.

Carlo Emilio Gadda was an engineer from Milan who worked in Italy, Belgium and Argentina. He became a full time writer around 1940 in Florence and then in the 1950s in Rome, where he worked for RAI (Italian National TV). In 1953, when RAI asked him to write up a compendium of "Policies for Radio Programming", Gadda wrote:

‘‘Radio listeners are not a 'public', so to speak. In truth, they are 'single people'... every listener is alone... sitting in their own armchair, after having captured the essence... the noble act of listening, he/she is bound to the secret susceptibility of being able to get irritated by the inopportune tone of a catechizing radio apparatus.

It is therefore better that the voice, and the text entrusted to it, avoid all those mannerisms that provoke the idea of a condescending tone, an imparted lesson, a sermon, a message coming from on high. It is equal to equal, free citizen to free citizen, thinking brain to thinking brain.’’

Equal to equal, with the freedom to think along the person thinking out loud -- thinking brain to thinking brain. This more nuanced form of experience is likely one of the reasons behind the renaissance of podcasts.

It takes practice and a highly developed sense of timing to create these kinds of conversations. From the NYT article:

Over the years, Gross has done some 13,000 interviews, and the sheer range of people she has spoken to, coupled with her intelligence and empathy, has given her the status of national interviewer. Think of it as a symbolic role, like the poet laureate — someone whose job it is to ask the questions, with a degree of art and honor.

[...]

In a culture in which we are all talking about ourselves more than ever, Gross is not only listening intently; she’s asking just the right questions.

Researcher Sherry Turkle has been studying digital culture for over thirty years. Her prognosis on the effects of digital on conversation is not rosy. In Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age Turkle says it's time to reclaim this face to face form of connection and exchange -- it's time to put down our smart phones and re-learn to find out what is going on in our relationships.

In a 2015 study by the Pew Research Center, 89 percent of cellphone owners said they had used their phones during the last social gathering they attended. But they weren’t happy about it; 82 percent of adults felt that the way they used their phones in social settings hurt the conversation.

We cannot expect to bridge our distance in conversation when we don't even try. Lack of conversation means decreased empathy, which is the root of the characteristically human qualities we increasingly need to succeed in the future.

Turkle says:

The psychologist Yalda T. Uhls was the lead author on a 2014 study of children at a device-free outdoor camp. After five days without phones or tablets, these campers were able to read facial emotions and correctly identify the emotions of actors in videotaped scenes significantly better than a control group.

What fostered these new empathic responses? They talked to one another. In conversation, things go best if you pay close attention and learn how to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. This is easier to do without your phone in hand. Conversation is the most human and humanizing thing that we do.

We find ourselves in solitude because we reclaim the space to be in conversation with our thoughts. When we understand better what we think, we bring more clarity into how we relate to others.

In the sound of silence I made an argument for the dynamic nature of appreciating the moment of pause in between words and sentences. It is the context that gives human interaction its flavor. When we fill that space with something other than being there, we leave much on the table.

Conversation is a reliable tool for thinking, alone and together. The back and forth, listening, building on what someone else said, and getting feedback are all built into conversation to help us accelerate learning.

a 2014 Pew study demonstrated that people are less likely to post opinions on social media when they fear their followers will disagree with them. Designing for our vulnerabilities means finding ways to talk to people, online and off, whose opinions differ from our own.

We know that a good conversation in a networking situation means more listening than talking. Our desire to be heard goes beyond the safe harbor of friendship. And it is not just our devices that keep us from having conversations -- it's also the busy trap.

At some level we know conversation is important but what exactly is conversation? In an earlier post, I took a stab at looking at what it is and where it comes from. The post was conversation as connection.

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Conversation is the most natural, effective, yet most complex mode of human connection. The goal of conversation is understanding between participants.

Understanding in communication is how we behave in front of a translation. We focus and we relax, we zoom in and out at the same time. We entertain the million thoughts and assumptions in our minds while the visual and auditory messages hit us.

The ingredients of a conversation:

1. The content - what we say. Although this comprises only about 7% of what we pay attention to, it still matters

2. The process - how we say it. It is estimated that 55% of the process is carried through by nonverbal communication with 38% being the vocal tone alone

3. The timing - when we say it. This influences greatly how we process information

4. By far the most important is permission. Are we talking with each other or at each other?

Out lives are based on our ability to communicate. The meaning of communication is the response it elicits, not the intention.

Conversation relates to the Latin root of conversation as sermo. If we look at one of the ancient Greek words for conversation diatribe' comes up, which means use of time, occupation, dialogue.

Conversation is a space where relationships are managed. These relationships may be sudden and invisible to many -- relationships between people, problems, solutions, processes, objects, and all of these and many more together.

When attention and authenticity accompany the message we shorten the distance in these relationships as we create something new.

It's interesting to observe here that the other Latin word for conversation is colloquium, which implies a more intimate setting. This became the English colloquial and German umgangssprachlich that literally means “of every day.”

Communication has Latin root in communicatio as well as one in commercium or exchange between people. The ancient Greeks called this omilia, which also meant commerce, relationship, intimacy.

Our brain is an associative network. It means that our memories record not just the specific details of events, but also our feelings about them. So when it is under the influence of one emotion, it habitually makes connections to past events that triggered that same emotional response.

Emotions affect the way we feel, but they also affect the way we remember. When we relive a memory, we make a new memory in the process, with new connections.

We like twists in a story because we are wired to remember novelty, to recall events that somehow deviate from our expectations. Our brains have a biologically grounded interest in surprise. Add to the mix considerations around context, cultural differences, social circumstances, and environmental noise.

When we come up with simple rules to get things done, we consciously or unconsciously engage fast thinking. The reason, Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman says, is that:

The automatic operations of System 1 generate surprisingly complex patterns of ideas, but only the slower System 2 can construct thoughts in an orderly series of steps.

We go with what our gut tells us for expediency-sake. The “good enough” option. As our more process-oriented ability runs in the background, we go about getting things done, simply. A more complete definition of the two systems Kahneman talks about illuminates how they operate differently:

System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control

System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration

In Thinking Fast and Slow Kahneman provides multiple examples from research to help us understand how while we identify with System 2, “the conscious, reasoning self that has beliefs, makes choices, and decides what to think about and what to do,” in reality most of the time we use System 1 to form quick and automatic “impressions and feelings.” These automatic feelings are “the main sources of explicit beliefs and deliberate choices of System 2.”

One feeds the other.

Taking care of business

“rather than expending conscious cognitive effort,” we “adopt universal heuristics that are cognitively easy, like representativeness (Pick what is usual) and availability (Pick what first comes to mind).”

When we lack time and have insufficient information, we either adopt automatic and obvious rules, or no rules at all to get things done.

However, when we try to figure out why some things work and others don't over time, we need to make those rules more effective.

Validating assumptions

Because simple rules tend to be fairly automatic, they are typically less strategic and accurate than we would like them to be. Or are they? The best way to learn if improving them leads to ore successful outcomes is to test them. Eisenhardt and a colleague engaged in a facilitated experiment to find out.

The experiment consisted of providing a common scenario and a few data points of a problem to solve to three groups of people, then adding one unique rule for each group. This was the additional rule. Two groups were told to “Listen to others,” and “Share your information.” The researchers categorized these two rules as helpful. The third group, however, received what the researchers thought was a useless simple rule, “Watch your Time.”

What happened next will surprise us as it did the researchers.

Predictably, the “Listen to others” group was the most successful. But, it was the “Watch your Time” useless rule group that came in second. The “Share your information” group came in last.

Why did a rule intended as helpful hold the group back?

Deconstructing the exercise, the researchers learned that while the instructions of the first two groups encouraged pauses and reflection or re-strategizing, those of the third group generated unhelpful behavior -- more talking.

Doing the right things, and doing things right

To be effective, simple rules need to encourage useful behavior. Less talk, more reflection and adjustments lead to accelerating the process for improving simple rules. This is helpful behavior. But it's not enough. To get to better rules Sull and Eisenhardt say we need to “figure out the logic behind the simple rules” and tie that logic back to real world success:

Simple rules seem to improve in a predictable pattern.

[...]

Over time, three things happen:

1/ their content shifts from superficial and convenient rules to strategic and abstract ones that prove more effective over a broader range of activities and decisions

2/ the different types of rules are learned in a specific, sequential order -- boundary and how-to rules first, then other rules that are more difficult to learn

3/ the rules go through simplification cycling, which means they grow in number and then shrink as circumstances change

This process of improvement benefits from “learning to do the right things:”

Key learning processes like consciously reflecting on past experience and engaging in varied but related experiences to accelerate improvement, and combining multiple learning processes is the most potent approach to improvement of all.

Doing the right things, tying together data points from multiple experiences, also needs to be coupled with doing things right. For example, Sull and Eisenhardt say:

A hallmark of experts is their efficient cognitive organization of relevant information into larger patterns or chunks than novices perceive.

Organization of information into patterns enables experts to handle more information at once and link different pieces of information together faster than novices can.

We can learn to become better, even expert, at seeing the patterns through Deliberate Practice, which doesn't mean practicing deliberately as the term might suggest, but practicing by doing things right.

According to Michael J. Mauboussin, experts perform well when the domain is rule-based with a wide range of outcomes -- for example, like in chess -- and perform equal or worse than collectives in probabilistic domains with a limited range of outcomes -- for example, like in poker.

In Think Twice, Mauboussin says that in rule-based domains that have a limited range of outcomes -- like for example in credit scoring or simple medical diagnosis -- once experts have investigated a problem based on past patterns and extrapolated the rules to guide decisions, computers are more reliable and cheaper to boot.

As we go through the process of improving simple rules and learn how to expand our options we want to keep an eye on keeping the rules simple enough to use consistently while we keep adapting them to changed circumstances. We may use a combination of experts to identify patterns and computers to churn the information thereafter, until the context changes and requires recalibrating the rules.

Matt Ridley has been a scientist, a journalist, and a national newspaper columnist. He is the chairman of the International Centre for Life, in Newcastle, England and a visiting professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York.

In a recent interview, Ridley said he reads mostly non fiction but also well researched fiction work. His selection of current reading covers the spectrum from science to historical narrative, from complex topics to lighter fare:

From this year's crop of science-themed, in addition to The Vital Question, the books are about science in the making:

p53: The Gene that Cracked the Cancer Code by Sue Armstrong - about the gene with an unassuming name, p53, that is the most studied in history. Its job is to scan our cells to ensure that when they grow and divide as part of the routine maintenance of our bodies, they do so without mishap. If a cell makes a mistake in copying its DNA during the process of division, p53 stops it in its tracks, sending in the repair team before allowing the cell to carry on dividing. If the mistake is irreparable and the rogue cell threatens to grow out of control (as happens in cancer), p53 commands the cell to commit suicide. Cancer cannot develop unless p53 itself is damaged or handicapped by some other fault in the system.

What you Want by Constantine Phipps - described as a literary feat: a novel written entirely in verse, depicting life in all its ordinariness. It gives voice to a new Everyman and brings forth an unparallelled modern epic

Our imagination and the ability to discover new worlds, to tell and read stories are not the only characteristics that separate us from other species. “The essential virtuousness of human beings is proved not by parallels in the animal kingdom, but by the very lack of convincing animal parallels,” says Ridley in The Origin of Virtues.

The book's central theme is an exploration of how we got to be so virtuous -- we behave with self-interest foremost in mind, but also in ways that do not harm, and sometimes even benefit, others -- over millions of years of evolution.

Many successful careers are forged on good relationships and curiosity opens us to learning as well as building human connections. Curiosity is the secret to a bigger life. The more curious we are, the greater our exposure to different ideas, the more opportunities we have to exercise our critical thinking.

From Wikipedia:

Critical thinking involves determining the meaning and significance of what is observed or expressed, or, concerning a given inference or argument, determining whether there is adequate justification to accept the conclusion as true.

“the careful, deliberate determination of whether one should accept, reject, or suspend judgment about a claim and the degree of confidence with which one accepts or rejects it.”

We also exercise our critical thinking when we take the time to examine problems and raise important questions in business.

Five characteristics of a critical thinker

A journalist taught me about critical thinking in writing and editing. The importance of vetting and uncovering more than one side to a story.

The five characteristics below can help us determine the extent of our familiarity with the use of critical thinking in our work and life (adapted from the Wikipedia entry):

1/ raising important questions and problems, formulating them clearly and precisely;

2/ gathering and assessing relevant information, using abstract ideas to interpret it effectively;

3/ coming to well-reasoned conclusions and solutions, testing them against relevant criteria and standards;

4/ thinking with an open-mind within alternative systems of thought, recognizing and assessing, as need be, assumptions, implications, and practical consequences; and

5/ communicating effectively with others in figuring out solutions to complex problems; without being unduly influenced by the thinking of others on the topic.

These abilities are critical in business -- and extremely useful in life. When we are able to suspend judgment long enough to negotiate meaning in a conversation, for example, our relationships benefit in the long term.

Another good use of critical thinking is to counter our tendency to see what we expect to see. Which is why good disagreement is central to progress. Culture drives what we want to see. As individuals and businesses, we have the ability to expand our options.

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Two effects of the over reliance on technology to interact.

1.) We think it's an extension of all our humanity but it's a regression of the part of us that communicates. This means we need to work harder to compensate by injecting critical thinking in our listening. Why listening is hard and how to think critically.

2.) Especially in social platforms, our interactions become limited to a small group of people with whom we likely agree. This means that the only way to create a ripple effect and stand out is either by feeding the insecurity monster and forgo respect and civility, or borrowing too readily the idea of another. We underestimate the value of ecosystems and the role of co-creation in our growth.

An inquisitive mind can keep us from falling into unproductive behaviors.

“The future, as always, does not lie in front of successful individuals, it must rest within them. Tourists and refugees inhabit our world,” says Italian artist Franceso Clemente. “Either you embrace change or you try to escape from it.”

The connection between understanding, acceptance, and listening

Waiting is also important. To be able to wait is important. In painting, waiting is a big part of the effort.

Waiting for both the mind and the material to make their narrative explicit, to develop the narrative.

Painting is not so much about decision, it's more about acceptance... of the fact that certain structures, orders, and narratives they really have their own saying and all you have to do is to listen.

When he saw Velasquez he understood that there were things in the world that he had absolutely no understanding about. He says:

This was my first encounter with suffering at a very early age. I looked up over this thing heartbroken and knew there was absolutely no way for me of understanding what it was and at the same time it had so much more physical presence, so much more than anything else around me.

[...]

I didn't know I wanted to be a painter. I'm a painter by default, because I really didn't want to be anything else.

Developing the narrative

In a more recent interview, Francesco Clements talks about the healing power of images, how he believes in inclusiveness, why he travels to India, and lives in New York City. New York city is where the inclusive culture of middle Europe survives, he says.

As Clemente says, his work develops in a non-linear mode, expanding and contracting in a fragmentary way, not defined by a style, but rather by his recording of the fluctuations of the self.

“I feel comfortable in not belonging.”

This is the territory of big ideas where we are “waiting for the mind and the material to develop the narrative.”

[image from the movie Great Expectations, where “paintings and drawings by Francesco Clemente, repping the work done by Finn, are distinctive and eye-catching.”]

How do we navigate the line between cooperation and competition? Probably not very well, or not all the time.

“The tension between competition and cooperation defines many of our interactions at home and work, and to succeed across these realms requires knowing when and how to do both. In our most important relationships, from the negotiating table in the boardroom to the breakfast table with our kids, we routinely face challenges that appear to offer two opposing solutions. Yet the question - should we cooperate or should we compete - is often the wrong one. Our most important relationships are neither cooperative nor competitive. Instead, they are both.”

“what comes next will not take the shape of cooperation or competition, but rather a shifting dynamic between the two. As we compete for scarce resources in our unstable world, it's not enough to be prepared to cooperate or compete. We must be prepared to do both.”

We live in a “both/and world” and knowing how to navigate when and how to pursue our own interests, and when and how to help others achieve theirs will help us come out on top in the uncharted complexity of business territory as well as personal relationships.

[I'll have more to say about the social science research in the book once I get through it.]

And beyond considerations on our judicious use of energy is also the story we tell ourselves about what is going on -- our worldview, our stories influence what we do. Which means we need to pay attention to becoming more aware of our behaviors.

Because we're hard-wired to respond to “human experience, or a judgement to reality that can change from positive to negative or negative to positive,” we respond well to Story. Why we look for a good story in a presentation, for example. In The Story Grid, Shawn Coyne says this human experience that can change in valence is the Story value. He lists some of them:

Reality, like fiction, is not black and white. There are progressive degrees of positivity or negativity for each. For example, between love and hate is indifference; beyond hate is hate masquerading as love or self-hatred.

Many of the most productive conversations we have lead to an understanding of sorts. In some cases they allow us to connect with one another in a way that leads to solving a problem, advancing a project, and creating opportunity for a next step or action.

I liken this kind of conversation to a negotiation where both or multiple parties participate to varying degrees.

Because people are involved, outcomes tend to be fairly unpredictable, and that is a good thing.

If we could boil down the dynamics of relationships to a specific and neat formula, we would cut ourselves out of the myriad possibilities that exist for new creation. In fact, while ideas may sound similar at the moment of conception, the sweet spot is in the combinations and permutations we find for practical executions.

We are living our lives more publicly -- as individuals and organizations -- so learning how to approach conversation as a negotiation is a benefit. Our digital imprint (we should now assume including out deleted emails) and what others experience of us are available for review.

When we talk about listening, engaging, sharing, we employ the principles of good communication. Yet the action does not stop when the conversation is over. The emotion generated before, during and after an exchange creates the momentum for what's next.

This is important because we buy, we join, and we connect on the basis of emotion. Then, as a way of justifying to ourselves and others our actions, we rationalize how we got there.

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Some cultures have a developed sense of the need for saving face - in Italian we call it fare una brutta figura. The five main or core concerns all human beings have that we need to be aware of to become more effective in negotiations are:

The book gets into very fine detail about the art and science of negotiation. For example, when they say “separate the people from the problem,” the authors mean that people problems often require more attention than substantive ones.

Humans are prone to defensive and reactive behavior. Thus their advice is to “build a working relationship independent of agreement or disagreement.” That means being able to deal with differences. We can use this advice in so many aspects of work and life, online and offline.

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The smarter we become at learning to observe our behaviors and those of others to understand and appreciate what is going on, and at making deliberate decisions on how we are going to respond, the better our experiences with relationships in business and in life.

Conversation Agent

Conversation Agent focuses on business, technology, digital culture, and customer psychology. At Conversation Agent LLC, I help organizations and brands that want to build better customer experiences tell a new story.